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Now Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) just get released shipping latest official mesa release 7.10.2. However current mesa snapshots have a huge amount of new features which make feel old this official release. Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick) ships an older pre-release snapshot of mesa 7.9.

So I am now providing a PPA with updated mesa and X drivers as an easy way for users to try all the new features developed in the past months and early detect eventual bugs to report to developers. This is somewhat inspired by the xorg-edgers PPA but it only provides graphics drivers to lower the risk of breakage. Also I want to provide some packaging improvements and possibly new features (e.g. integrate testing branches like glsl-130 or pipe-video) when they'll be sufficient stable.

Experimental drivers:
If you want to use the gallium nouveau or i915 driver install also the experimental package:

Code:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental

The gallium nouveau driver will then be used by default rather than using llvmpipe.

To force the use of gallium i915 driver (classic driver will still be the default):

Code:

LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/dri-alternates glxgears -info

4 - Debugging and reporting problems

If you have some problem with the drivers try running the application from the command line and see if there are any graphics related warnings (note that mesa is built with --enable-debug which can provide useful debug informations). Also type dmesg to see if there are other related informations here. If you get crashes install the relevant -dbg pacakges (libgl1-mesa-dri-dbg or libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental-dbg for 3D drivers and xserver-xorg-video-intel-dbg , xserver-xorg-video-nouveau-dbg or xserver-xorg-video-radeon-dbg for X drivers) and reproduce the crash with gdb. Example:

Comment

when you use Ubuntu to select the gallium/non-gallium drivers as default? I prefer to compile a snapshot on my own, but basically a nice idea. How do you build the 32 bit mesa libs for a 64 bit system? Since llvm is forced i could not build em...

Comment

Thanks for putting this PPA together. I just added you PPA to my system instead of xorg-edgers. I like that it defaults to LLVMpipe instead of swrast.

Glad you like it

I'll definitely be donating something if you keep on updating it and if it proves useful when, for example, the Gallium VP8 decoder starts producing useful code and you package this too.

That's the plan.

BTW, has glxgears been updated recently? I see the brightness of the gears constantly alternating between dark and bright, is this intentional?

Are you sure you are using my mesa packages? This looks like a bug when building mesa with --enable-shared-api :https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36282
xorg-edgers packages are building with this flag but I disabled it just to avoid this bug. So I suspect you are still using xorg-edgers packages (they have a higher version then mine because they incorrectly use version numbers like 7.11.0+git..., but since final mesa 7.11 is still not released they should use 7.11.0~git... like mine do).

Comment

when you use Ubuntu to select the gallium/non-gallium drivers as default? I prefer to compile a snapshot on my own, but basically a nice idea.

Nice idea. Ideally there should be a dri_conf to select between /usr/lib/dri and /usr/lib/dri-alternates (then using the same libGL) but I suppose libGL can't use something like ld.so.conf to configure the dri directory.

Alternatively gl_conf could be used but the package should build two libGL (and put them in different directory), each one with its own different dri path.

Actually I base my package on the Ubuntu one and they don't have anything like this. I'd like to not diverge too much from their packaging, but maybe I could take a look at it in the future.

How do you build the 32 bit mesa libs for a 64 bit system? Since llvm is forced i could not build em...

I have a 32 bit system and I never did that. I think you should build a 32 bit llvm (I suppose you already built a 32 bit libdrm and installed ia32?).

Comment

Dude, I'm sorry to tell you, but that's not what this flag does. If you want debug information, you simply compile with "-g" and create debug information files from the resulting build. You should NOT --enable-debug since it enables extra codepaths that hurt performance.

Comment

Dude, I'm sorry to tell you, but that's not what this flag does. If you want debug information, you simply compile with "-g" and create debug information files from the resulting build.

Debug informations are already enabled and are available in -dbg packages. --enable-debug is unrelated to debug symbols and it helped me to find a whole numbers of game and mesa bugs. Just some examples (the ones I still remember right now...) of bug I reported and that were debugged and fixed thanks to this mesa flag:

I also added a patch (and sent it upstream) to workaround a problem where mesa used statically linked llvm library, saving well over 100MB when installing libgl1-mesa-dri and libegl1-mesa-drivers (note that this reduces the benefit from using the better package compression from 50% to 10%).